Ethnic Identity, Collective Action and Trust: An Experimental Approach

Both in research and in daily life, it is clear that individuals often favor people with whom they share an ethnic identity, and discriminate against those who are different from them. In the United States, ethnic identification is considered fairly easy because classifications generally break down on the fault lines of skin color. But differentiating between Sunnis and Shiites, between Hutus and Tutsis, and other ethnic groups, is more difficult.

Because it is not known how well individuals are able to identify the ethnic backgrounds of others and what factors affect their ability to do so, James Habyarimana, Macartan Humphreys, Daniel Posner, and Jeremy Weinstein will measure the ability of individuals to place one another into ethnic categories. Using video and photographs, the researchers will ask five hundred respondents in Uganda to identify the ethnicity, religion, and place of origin of individuals representing each of the country’s nine major ethnic groups. The respondents will be asked to reveal how they made their determination and how confident they are in their assessment. Next, the researchers will conduct tests to determine how ethnicity affects individuals' willingness to trust. These tests will involve games in which a players willingness to cooperate with co-ethnics and out-group members will be evaluated in different settings. The different games will allow Habyarimana and colleagues to measure the influence of institutions on cooperation, the extent to which shared ethnicity fosters cooperation, the degree to which ethnicity entails shared language and norms, thereby facilitating communication, and the extent to which ethnicity functions as a coordinating device to develop trust.

The findings were published as an RSF volume, Coethnicity: Diversity and the Dilemmas of Collective Action.